Eric Schimidt at World Economic Forum showing off his iPhone

I got this video at Digg, and besides the interview with Eric, which is great to watch, the iPhone in his pocket is what calls my attention

Go forward to around 24:30, its very brief so, pay attention!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mmISIWNcVY[/youtube]

You Tube Mobile goes live using H.263 streaming

I was reading the Multimedia Blog at S60.com and found this interesting post from Jukka. He was the first to report the oficial mobile version of YouTube, Nokia and YouTube announced the partnership earlier this year at 3GSM in Barcelona to put the videos on Nokia’s Nseries phones.

You can check it out by yourself at http://m.youtube.com, the specifications according to Jukka are:

• 3GP/RTSP streaming video (no downloads), when you click in any video it opens the RealPlayer.
• video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB
• video bitrate ~34kbps
• Streaming Server: Darwin Streaming Server v5.5.3 (Open Source) running on Linux

I’ve tested for a while on my E61 (using Wifi and EDGE) and worked pretty well, the audio and video quality is far from good, but you can definitely watch something and have a preview of the video on the go. Just one clue, don’t even bother to watch sports videos, they look terrible.

It’s interesting to see that the YouTube guys are using H.263, besides the fact that the new Symbian/Windows Mobile and other OS flavor phones already support MPEG-4, certainly the focus is on the mass. I hope they offer other options in the near future including the possibility to download the videos instead of streaming it.

Here are some screenshots:

New Ask.com design

Last week Ask.com launched a new layout and some new features they are calling Ask 3D. Sometimes we are only checking on news about Yahoo and Google and we forget about the fourth player in the US market, Ask.com.

Unfortunately we don’t have Ask.com in Brazil, but is good to see that they are moving forward and innovating without copying Google and Yahoo moves. This new Ask.com is really good looking, the 3 panels are really useful, besides the fact that I think this is something for advanced users other than the average search user. They’ve added some new features that were available on the beta site, Askx.com, and there are a lot of new features, Check it out the complete list in here. And there is a interesting post at the Ask.com blog that talk about the transition from Askx to Ask 3D.

One of the coolest features is the improved “Binoculars“, which allow you to preview the website with larger images. Here is the image from a search for Globo.com

As Ask executives stated, the redesign may not take market share away from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, but it can increases the number of time the current users visit the site. Recently, in an interview to the Business 2.0 magazine, Jim Lanzone stated that Ask.com is focused on improving the search results, rather than on distractions like e-mail or blog services. “If we grow one point of market share, that translates to about 15 percent revenue growth,” Lanzone said.

The camera behind Google’s Street View

Here it is the camera used to take the awesome photos for the Google Maps’s new feature - Street View.

Here is the camera on top of a VW’s New Bettle

It seems to be manufactured by a company called Immersive Media.